Misinformation is damaging, dangerous, and costs lives. It spreads through communities like an infectious disease, and can cause people to behave in ways that endanger themselves and their community. The best way to slow the spread of misinformation is inoculating ourselves against the techniques of science denial. But how? Through critical thinking.
Here is an example of using critical thinking to examine the claim that COVID-19 is less deadly than the seasonal flu. This approach comes from a methodology I developed with critical thinking philosophers Peter Ellerton and David Kinkead. We outlined a step-by-step process for analysing a claim:
- Break the claim up into starting assumptions (premises) and conclusion.
- Check if the argument is logically valid: does the conclusion follow from the premises?
- If not, add any unstated assumptions to make the argument logically valid.
- Finally, check if all the premises are true.
Let’s apply this approach to the myth that COVID-19 deaths are less than annual deaths from influenza, so COVID-19 is less of a threat than the seasonal flu. The latest sobering expert projections of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths have seen this claim fade from public discourse. Nevertheless, this was a popular argument even as late as March 24 when Donald Trump argued, “We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off.” And this argument was promoted repeatedly by Trump and others in the early months of the outbreak, when a fast response was so crucial to slowing the exponential spread of the disease. If we deconstruct this myth into the argument structure of premises and conclusion, it looks like this:
This argument contains two premises. In the 2018/2019 flu season, 34,000 people died from the seasonal flu. In contrast, there are currently 5,000 deaths from COVID-19 (and the number of deaths was significantly lower when this argument was more popular). However, this argument isn’t logically valid – the conclusion that COVID-19 is less of a threat than the flu doesn’t necessarily follow from the premises. There is an unstated assumption that we need to add to this argument to make it logically valid.
The third premise is that the number of COVID-19 deaths will remain fewer than flu deaths. This assumption commits the fallacy of slothful induction: ignoring relevant evidence when coming to a conclusion. It ignores the fact that COVID-19 has a much higher mortality rate than influenza. Experts estimate that COVID-19 kills between one to three of every hundred people it infects while flu kills about one in every thousand infected people.
It also ignores that COVID-19 is more infectious than flu. COVID-19 is new to the human population, so we are all completely susceptible. In contrast, all adults have been exposed to influenza for years and so have a degree of pre-existing immunity. Furthermore, about half of Americans gain some immunity by getting flu shots each year.
Thus the assumption that COVID-19 deaths are going to remain fewer than flu deaths ignores highly relevant evidence indicating that in fact we expect the number of future deaths from COVID-19 to increase significantly.
Having identified the fallacy underpinning this myth, how do you most effectively communicate this to people in order to inoculate them against this misinformation? One way is what I’ve just done – reveal the argument structure and pinpoint the argument goes wrong. I’ve conducted research that shows this is an effective way of neutralizing logically flawed arguments.
Another way is through parallel argumentation – take the flawed logic from this argument and transplant it into an analogous situation to show how absurd and flawed the logic is:
Note: Thanks to Ann Reid and Glenn Branch from the National Center for Science Education with whom I initially collaborated with in debunking this myth.
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